If you're planning a configuration management (CM) project, it's time to build a CM Plan. Joe Farah writes on on a number of areas that need to be addressed in your plan in order to follow software configuration management (SCM) best practices.

If you're planning a configuration management (CM) project, it's time to put together a CM Plan. A CM plan can take on many forms and the CM Crossroads site is a great place to investigate what goes into a plan. In this article I'm going to concentrate on a number of areas that need to be addressed in your plan in order to follow best practices.

What's Your Product Road Map You may be putting together a CM plan for a project, or for an entire organization. One of the first things that you need to do is to consider which products (including process products) are going to be managed under your CM plan. You then need to look at the products and for each identify the product road map. If you're creating software for a one-time event, such as the display controller for the celebration of a new millennium, you may only have one release of the software to worry about. Your product road map will be a straight line targeted towards the millennium celebration.

But most software will have an ongoing sequence of major releases, with perhaps some milestone releases in-between. A product road map for something like Microsoft's Windows OS might look something like the one below, with the dotted line representing today:

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About the author

Joe Farah is the President and CEO of Neuma Technology and is a regular contributor to the CM Journal. Prior to co-founding Neuma in 1990 and directing the development of CM+, Joe was Director of Software Architecture and Technology at Mitel, and in the 1970s a Development Manager at Nortel (Bell-Northern Research) where he developed the Program Library System (PLS) still heavily in use by Nortel's largest projects. A software developer since the late 1960s, Joe holds a B.A.Sc. degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto. You can contact Joe at farah@neuma.com